Monday, January 03, 2005

Well, it's late

I've learnt the hard way that if you have something that feels like a scab on your back, it probably is a scab and you probably shouldn't scratch it.

Another good lesson is when you're in a hole, stop digging. I wish I'd taken that advice in the past.

After more than a year, I was finally feeling confident enough to revisit some of my time at Imperial College- not least because I had a really strange dream about that place, and coincidentally, I ended up there today.

Looking back on what I've found on the web about my time editing the college newspaper, it doesn't exactly look like I did a very good job of it. But I always knew that. I suppose I hadn't got that much insight into exactly how much of a twat I made of myself half the time. (I seem to remember some of the time I was really nice though.)

I though I was being pretty brave to go back there, but I'm feeling comfortable enough about how things have gone since then to be able to put it down to history. I always had a strong sense at Imperial that it wasn't quite my life, and I wasn't quite myself. And I was never happy there. So no matter how badly I left College, it actually seems I've got back that thing I was looking for back then- as well as coming away with some lovely friends, even if still no degree. But it's still pretty difficult, if necessary, to come back and be reminded of it once in a while. And it was nice that there's a big mass of pipes and steel where my old office was, meaning that there's no going back to a lot of those places.

But that's absolutely the last time I go within half a mile of the place.